Principals' Offices Tougher To Fill

September 3, 2000|By JACQUES STEINBERG The New York Times

As the academic year begins for the nation's 53 million students, a growing number of schools are rudderless, struggling to replace a graying corps of principals at a time when the pressure to raise test scores and other new demands have made an already difficult job an increasingly thankless one.

In Vermont, one of every five principals has retired or resigned in the last few months alone, some of them replaced temporarily by other principals who retired several years earlier.

In Washington state, nearly 300 principals, or 15 percent of the total, left their jobs at the end of the last school year, with some of them moving to the private sector and others taking their pensions to Idaho, Oregon, Nevada and California, where desperate districts are offering signing bonuses and other perks, according to Washington school officials.

In Kentucky and Texas, where the pace at which principals are fleeing is as accelerated as it is in Vermont, job openings in some districts that drew more than a dozen applicants as recently as five years ago are now attracting as few as three, according to principals' associations there.

And in New York City, which has been unwilling to compete with suburbs that pay principals as much as $20,000 more a year, 163 schools will open this week with a temporary administrator welcoming students back from summer vacation.

The vacancies, when combined with the 200 schools that opened with interim principals last September, mean that more than one in four principals' posts turned over in New York in less than two years.

Those who have departed in recent months, in New York and elsewhere, often cite the mounting stress of a job that once mostly involved establishing an orderly and nurturing environment for learning, and displaying a firm disciplinary hand.

But during the movement to improve schools that has swept through classrooms over the last decade, the principal has become as visibly accountable as a football coach, and must suffer the wrath of parents and state monitors if a school has a losing season, as measured by falling test scores and unmet statewide standards.

In some instances principals are being fired with no clear successor waiting in the wings.

Once given wide latitude, the principal has seen his autonomy hemmed in: The movement has spawned thousands of school governing councils, in which parents, teachers and community members weigh in on every matter before the principal -- from teacher hiring to lunchroom menus -- with the principal left to forge consensus.

Meanwhile, newly savvy parents have seized on obscure passages in special-education law to wring additional services for their children, leaving principals buried in thick binders of federal and state statutes like beleaguered young lawyers.

"You want them to have a legal background and a business sense, to know children and child development and adult development, plus statistics, accounting and certainly technology," said Robbe Brook, the superintendent of the Washington Central Supervisory Union in central Vermont.

She had to fill vacancies at three of her five elementary schools this summer, two of them with temporary hires.

And then there is safety.

Highly publicized shootings like those at Columbine High School in Colorado last year have forced some principals to affect the hawklike vigilance of Secret Service agents, panning the cafeteria for the early warning signals of an attack.

Around the time of the Columbine massacre, John Willard, the principal of Colchester High School in northern Vermont, fielded five bomb threats in five weeks -- each necessitating that he spend the night with the police in search of suspicious packages.

After 12 years in the principal's office, Willard, 52, resigned last year to return to his math classroom, accepting a $14,000 pay cut -- to $53,000 from $67,000 -- even though he had two children in college.

Never mind that such jobs are usually among the highest-paying in public education. Most of the nation's 120,000 public school principals began working in education in the 1970s -- the median age is about 50, according to national surveys -- and many will be eligible to retire within five years.

And teachers are retiring, too, at a time when districts need more of them to reduce class sizes; the nation is expected to hire 2 million new teachers in the next 10 years.

To fill the chair in the principal's office, schools are often making one-year appointments, twisting the arms of veteran teachers or turning to not-so-recent retirees.